There once was a golden age for EDA editorial. Seems funny to say nowadays, when we see EDA editorial in a virtual shambles…where one or two publications gamely soldier on as pure play editorial ventures…while others have adopted various sponsorship business models, thereby incurring the snide, not-accurate accusation of being pay-for-play vehicles.

Among the handful of first-tier publications back around the turn of the century, EE Times clearly was the go-to book for EDA. Staffed by a corps of editors who brought their sharp, keen-edged industry knowledge to their reporting, no EDA startup thought they launched themselves successfully without being covered in EE Times. And the formula worked for quite a while. I still remember how those 240 page tomes came to the mailbox each week.

There were two people who figured prominently in the EE Times braintrust.

Brian Fuller, as editor-in-chief, oversaw and created much of what was successful for the various sections that covered all of electronic design. And there wasRichard Goering, the longtime EDA editor with his imposing manner, startling industry knowledge and contacts. Richard was perhaps best known for refusing to allow canned presentations during interviews. He’d ask for material before the interview, then start off the interview with those famous words, “I’ve looked over your material and have a few questions,” and run the 30 -45 minute interview. It was a little like Steve Jobs saying, “Oh, and one more thing.”

EDA editorial has changed, needless to say. Fortunately, we have Fuller and Goering here to talk a little about what EDA editorial used to be, what it is today, and what we can look toward in the future. We’ll post their thoughts over the next several weeks, usually on a Monday.

I can’t think of any individuals more qualified to speak cogently on this subject.

Brian Fuller

Richard Goering

ED: Brian, Richard, thanks for taking time to reminisce a little and to analyze and speculate about where we’re at now. So let me kick it off with this question:

What’s happened to electronic design editorial and where is it today?

BRIAN: Ed, to your question what’s happened to electronic design editorial is pretty simple: it’s still there…it’s just in a different place.

ED: I keep referring to a golden age for EDA editorial. There was one, wasn’t there?

BRIAN: Yes, there was! Think back 20 years ago and you had at least three major publications with EDA editors of one type or another: EDN, Electronic Design, EE Times, Electronic News (not to mention overseas publications).

ED: There also was Computer Design, the first publication covering EDA to bite the dust.

BRIAN: That’s right!

ED: But I interrupted you…

BRIAN: EE Times, of which I am most familiar, had 2.5 editors at one point covering the design automation industry from the technology and business standpoint.

ED: So what happened?

BRIAN: Well, we all know the backstory since then: In 2001, the dot-com bubble burst. Semiconductor and EDA companies shifted marketing dollars to their own site development and to those publications they thought could deliver more eyeballs.

ED: What about the notion that EDA vendors never bought sufficient advertising and therefore killed their own editorial?

BRIAN: It wasn’t just with EDA, but I think EDA started the ball rolling, and they were big advertisers so the impact was significant. Electronics publications had to prioritize areas that they were going to cover. Paul Miller, then CEO of UBM Electronics, said pretty bluntly “EDA marketers: If you’re not going to support us, we can’t invest in editors.”

That was the end of Mike Santarini at EE Times; just a few years later it was the end of Richard Goering, now my colleague at Cadence.

RICHARD: Well, not really the “end” of Mike or myself; Mike went to Xilinx, and I’m now at Cadence. But I do agree with Brian that a lack of advertising revenues ended my career at EE Times.

ED: So what do we have today?

RICHARD: Not much is left in print. EE Times, EDN and Electronic Design still exist on-line, but in more of a blog format than traditional journalism. Their EDA coverage is limited.

BRIAN: Richard’s right. There isn’t an EDA “press corps” in the old definition of the term. The electronics publishing industry has restructured itself into smaller, more specialized sites with much lower overhead than the traditional electronics publishing houses, and they are quite healthy. Editors do cover EDA from various angles, but they also cover lithography and foundry and SoC design and so on.

These are outfits like SemiWiki, EE Journal and its sister publications, Semiconductor Engineering, Chip Design Magazineand so on.

Over this same period, those companies that shifted their marketing dollars away from third-party publishers to build out their own sites, realized they needed content experts, because that¹s never been their strength. So, as more editors have been turned out onto the streets from third-party publishing, industry companies have eagerly snapped them up to build content.

Right now, we have a very interesting mixture of editors working together from two sides of the aisle, if you will, to create technology conversations.

……………………..

So what is the EDA editorial braintrust these days? See what Richard and Brian have to say about it in our next blog.

Today we will hear from McKenzie Mortensen, of IPextreme, on print vs. digital.

McKenzie Mortensen

I’m far more on the fence about this topic than I ever thought I would be. In all honesty, I’m not completely sure where I stand. I’ll try to replicate my thought process below:

Pro Print

I’m a literature nerd in a very big way—BA English (Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture), MA Children’s Literature, life-long bookworm. I love books—the look, the feel, the smell, the different typefaces, the weight of a volume as I’m reading… it’s a sensory experience as much as it is an intellectual one. I have actually begun collecting antique hardcovers and rare picture books over the past couple of years. From hand bound antiques to glossy coffee table volumes, books are a form of art.

I suffer from a mild obsession with stationery and paper products in general, plus I am an avid paper-crafter. I love to scrapbook and make collages, and magazines often come in very handy for harvesting images. I love cutting up magazines and turning them into something new. I’ve done some really neat things with old book pages also (only from damaged volumes, of course—I could never kill a book without it being a humane death).

There are certain circumstances when I would not feel comfortable having a tablet with me. For example, when I’m going to the beach or hanging out by the pool, the last thing I want to take with me is my iPad. A cheap paperback or a magazine seems a better choice in a wet, sandy environment where damage is likely.

I have a lot of bookworm friends, and one of our favorite things to do is trade books. Until it’s possible to lend a book to a friend digitally, I will need print copies of my favorites so that I can share them with people I know will appreciate them.

Books come from bookstores and libraries, and if I could live in either one, I totally would. The atmosphere is simultaneously calming and invigorating to me, a heady blend of paper, ink, and curiosity.

Pro Digital

I thought I would always be firmly a print girl, but I run into problems when I travel; as a fairly quick reader, I usually need to take more than one book with me on a trip in order to ensure that I’ll have sufficient reading material. As you can imagine, my carryon bags have been rather weighty at times. I started using my iPad only for travel to avoid the 50-pound hand luggage problem.

The illuminated screen is great for reading under any light conditions without disturbing those around me (on a dark airplane, for instance).

I can download another book whenever I want to (well, provided I have Wi-Fi access). Simple!

I love that I can highlight passages and make notes easily as I read. You can take the girl out of literary academia, but you can’t take literary academia out of the girl, I guess! I developed a “study as you read” method during my education that I still apply to leisure reading. Such a nerd! Another bonus in this area is that I can easily explore allusions made in the text. I can look up dates and brush up on historical events, for example, as necessary. I can do all of these things when reading a print volume, but it’s not very practical when I’m on the go.

Reading magazines digitally affords me the huge benefit of “clickability.” If an article mentions a restaurant I’d like to try, I can instantly view their website and check out the menu. I can order products or seek more information without having to dog-ear a page and remember to look things up later.

I can bookmark things and save images with ease, and in a very compact amount of space. Like many crafty people, I suffer from a Pinterest addiction.

We old gen folks bemoan the passing of print, even though we (in truth) haven’t cared about print for a number of years – finding the true value being on the web. I think it’s more symbolic for us old folks than anything else.

In the wake of the closing of the print editions by UBM, we decided to follow up with the new gen EDA folks we interviewed last week to get their take on this turn of events.

First up is Hannah Watanabe, of Synopsys, with her thoughts on the news…..

Hannah Watanabe

My mind goes back and forth when it comes to the whole print versus digital media. Personally, when it comes to books, I prefer to have the print version. There is something about turning a page and being able to physically see and feel how many pages I have read and how many I have left. When I’m done with the book, I can put it on a shelf with all of the other books that I have read and feel a sense of accomplishment.

However, when it comes to magazines or monthly or quarterly publications, I much prefer to have access to a digital copy. Unlike books, which I tend to read at home with a cup of tea and a blanket, I find myself looking at magazines and other publications when I’m on the go. When I’m on the go (say waiting for a dentist appointment), I only have bits and pieces of time to read, so it is much nicer to have a digital version or a magazine or publication on my phone than the whole printed version shoved in my purse. So, in short, I think that it is a good and positive move on EE Time’s part to go completely digital. With the age of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, I’m sure that the electronic version has a much larger audience and reach. Of course, I do feel for those who are losing their jobs due to a complete migration to digital.

For more than several years now, Peggy Aycinena has noted the dearth of new blood entering the EDA and IP industry ranks. Those of us who started in the industry in the 1980s still seem to dominate the corporate, engineering and marketing ranks. One area where we do see an infusion of new generation folks is in the marketing communications area. So Liz Massingill and I asked three of the new generation people to allow us to put them on the spot and talk a little about what new and old generation EDA and IP people bring to the party. With us are: McKenzie Mortensen of IPextreme, Darcy Pierce of Synopsys and Hannah Watanabe of Synopsys.

Ed: McKenzie, Darcy, Hannah, thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. So let’s kick off with a question about you. What does the new generation bring to EDA and IP that the old generation doesn’t?

McKenzie: We love to shake things up.

Darcy: One of the more obvious attributes that I think our generation brings to the table is a fresh perspective, especially in the “older” industry of EDA where everyone seems to have 20+ years of experience.

Hannah: I think we bring a fresh perspective on how technology is being used today, especially by those who are just entering the work force, the Generation Y people.

The next entry in our prediction series comes from Karen Bartleson, esteemed blogger, standards proponent, social media guru and Sr. Director of Community Marketing at Synopsys:

Karen Bartleson

2013 will be the year when people stop saying “engineers don’t use social media.” The data will show that indeed, they do use social media for both personal and work purposes. Not all engineers use it and some never will, but the way people live and work has changed. Engineers who are savvy about the modern ways that people communicate are seeing the benefits of incorporating social media into their regular activities.

To finish off our series of predictions, I would like to point you to another series of interesting and informative prophesies. Click on the following topics to see these predictions collected by Brian Bailey, Editor of EDA DesignLine.

This year, we’ll see an old standards battle get resolved. Now that all the players are participating in the IEEE Standard 1801 project (IEEE Standard for Design and Verification of Low Power Integrated Circuits), we can finally put the UPF-CPF debate to rest. Let’s hope that peace will reign and the temptation to fight one more time about a single low power standard will be overcome.

Social media will become less of a curiosity or a perceived waste of time for engineers. We’ll see more EDA customers helping answer each other’s questions and sharing more information (nothing proprietary, of course). LinkedIn discussions will have more depth, not simply people posting “read my blog”.

Facebook will remain more of a social vehicle, and for many engineers of our generation, a misunderstood channel. YouTube videos that provide good content – “how-to” and learning opportunities – will become popular. Twitter will remain a mystery for most, while a minority will find it of much value (include me in the minority). Marketers who spam social media channels with marketing-speak will be shunned. And, we’ll have some great guests on Conversation Central radio.

I (Liz Massingill) recently had a chance to chat with Amelia Dalton, News Editor at EE Journal and host of the weekly webcast, Fish Fry. She shared her thoughts on the future of EE Publishing and EDA.

Liz: You must have the most unique feature in EE publishing – your weekly webcast on EE Journal. How did you come up with the idea of Fish Fry?

Amelia: I’ve been hosting an engineering webcast series called Chalk Talk for about five years now. Chalk Talk has been really successful and has grown a huge fan base, but it is a commercial series where a company sponsors each episode, and I wanted to do something more editorial that had the same sense of humor and spirit as Chalk Talk. I’m the news editor for EE Journal, so every press release in the electronic industry comes across my desk. As you know – a few of these press releases are interesting and useful, and some are completely ridiculous and quite funny.

Liz:But I’m sure you’ve never gotten one of those from us, right? 😉

Amelia: I came up with the idea for an engineering news-related podcast as a fun-finale to our editorial week. I wanted to report the interesting real news, and to make fun of some of the… less useful stuff.

Liz: Your irreverent humor has certainly appealed to me.

Amelia: I wanted to capture some of the engineering culture and something about the lifestyle and the more human side of engineers. I envisioned something for electronic engineers that was like a combination of “The Daily Show” and “This American Life.” I also wanted to build in a good measure of nerd appeal. I’ve kept pretty true to that concept for the first year of Fish Fry.

Liz: So who is your target audience?

Amelia: My target audience is definitely the career electronic engineer, but as it is with the rest of our editorial content at EE Journal, I want my Fish Fry broadcasts to be approachable for anyone who works in EE and maybe even those ultra-nerdy friends of mine! One of the things we’ve always worked to do is make complex technology accessible for less technical people and to put the deep-nerd stuff in perspective for the hard-core engineering brain. I think Fish Fry captures that.

Liz: Indeed it does. How have they reacted to your on-air persona? For me, that’s the draw that keeps me coming back!

Amelia: The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I think my on-air persona is a big part of that, as well as the slightly irreverent take we have on technology news! I very diligently try to put myself in the place of the “average” engineer and investigate each topic I pursue from that angle. It doesn’t hurt to throw in the occasional Star Trek reference either.

Amelia: Not many people know this, but my father was a voice over talent and radio DJ for many years when I was a child. I heard “Member FDIC” more times than I could count! Before we launched Fish Fry, I had been News Editor and Chalk Talk webcast host for 5 years at Techfocus Media, which I continue to do to this day and that experience has been absolutely invaluable.

Liz: What interests you most about EDA? Or does it?

Amelia: EDA is a very unique industry and I definitely think it doesn’t get the credit it deserves – or it’s share of the electronics industry pie. It is really the backbone of the modern electronics industry, but your average consumer may not even know EDA exists and your average engineer may not know much about it, other than the tools he or she is already familiar with.

Liz: I know one of those engineers. What can we do about that?

Amelia: One of the things I try to do is to help the average engineer – who is the customer of the EDA industry – better understand the companies and people behind the tools they are using every day. I think it’s easy to expect EDA tools to cost and behave just like mass-market commercial software, but EDA tools are a completely different thing. I can’t give EDA the revenue share it deserves – they need to figure that out on their own, but I can at least raise the awareness of the importance of EDA and the challenges that industry faces among their target customers.

Liz:And believe me, we all appreciate that.What is your opinion of the social media craze and its influence on the EDA industry or the EE industry? How has social media influenced or altered editorial and communications in general in EDA and the EE industry?

Amelia: Engineers have been using social media for a lot longer than this most recent craze, truth be told. If you think about it – Usenet was the first social media, and engineers were using that voraciously before the web even existed. I think a large community of engineers are still rooted in those venues and haven’t been so fast to make the move to newer properties like Facebook and Twitter.

Liz: What do you think is holding them back?

Amelia: I think most EDA companies think they should be involved in some level of social media, but they are not sure how to start. There are some intrinsic problems with EE and social media, and the biggest is the lack of information that companies (and the engineers who work for them) are allowed to divulge. The center of social media is about sharing information, and since NDAs, project secrecy, IP protection, and paranoia rule the roost at most companies, I’m not sure the EE community at large is able to take advantage of a lot of the community power of social media – at least for direct work-related content. To make things even more complicated, a lot of companies still block social media sites on their company networks. Engineers will still find ways to share information, though, whether it includes personal Facebook accounts or anonymous posts like what is found at John Cooley’s Deep Chip…But overall, I believe that social media as we see it today will have an altogether different role within EE than it does to the rest of the world. Our philosophy on social media has been to be all-inclusive. When I post a new Fish Fry, for example, we generally put it on the front page of EE Journal, in the e-mail newsletters, on facebook, on twitter, on RSS, and we provide a mobile version. We want to cover all the bases. I think we dropped the 2-cans and a string version just a couple of weeks ago.

Liz: What about the pigeon and the message in a bottle? 😉 What does the future hold for EDA?

Amelia: Well, that’s a very good question! I believe that the business model for EDA as a whole needs to see some serious changes in the future…when that will happen, well, I’m not sure I can predict that. I can see how more smaller niche tool companies will be snatched up by the bigger fish, so they can have more robust tool offerings, but I think we need to see more real innovation from inside the big EDA companies as well.

Liz:Do you see other types of companies gobbling up small EDA vendors?

Amelia: I also see chip companies snatching up smaller tool companies as well, to add to their tool suites, so that is providing some competition for commercial EDA companies that they haven’t seen much in a few decades – in-house tools competing with commercial ones… Who will be left when the dust settles, who knows?…it will be very interesting to watch it all unfold.

Liz:Along with a plethora of editorial material. Speaking of editorial, what’s your 2 cents on EE publishing. Where’s it going?

Amelia: I believe EE publishing is going to be an online only endeavor in the near future. As we have made our mission from the start here at Techfocus Media, I think the electronics industry trade press needs to continuously find new avenues to reach the EE community of the world. Publishers must be flexible with content delivery as they maintain editorial intergity. I am deeply concerned by the number of publications that have fallen back re-writing press releases, relying on contributed articles, and the “pay for play” mode of editorial and I am very proud that EE Journal has never and will never go that way. I believe that we, as the trade press need to report the truth wherever it may lay, and to be loyal to our audience. Publishers need to find ways to make a viable business for themselves without violating those underlying principles of responsible and ethical journalism. It’s possible, and taking the easy short cuts is just plain lazy.

Liz:I like the way you think, Amelia. And I think I’ve just been…….fried.

If you want to be fried, you can catch Amelia every week on Fish Fry at:

The big trend in EDA for 2010 will be the acceptance of social media as an additional means for communicating with customers, partners, and competitors.

Now that blogging is settling in as a viable source of information from media people, company experts, and independent publishers, more new media tools will come into play. Not all tools are right for everyone or every situation, so the EDA industry will explore the options and experiment with a variety of community-development activities.

LinkedIn and Facebook will offer special interest groups a place to congregate. Twitter will be tested by more people – who today are curious or skeptical – as a means of immediate, brief interaction. EDA suppliers will offer new communication channels and those that are truly value-add will thrive.

The EDA world won’t change overnight, but the trends in social media will be noticeable.

In 2010, we’ll see an accelerated move to doing more design at higher levels of abstraction.

Chip complexity and the skyrocketing cost of physical design, along with the advent of 3D stacks is forcing this. Designers just won’t be able to iterate in the back end in 2010 and beyond. It’ll take too long and cost too much.

Power management, design verification, design for test and timing closure will all be “close to done” before handoff to synthesis and place & route. The traditional backend flow of IC design will become a more predictable, routine process, which will accelerate its trend toward commoditization and consolidation.

This move to higher levels of abstraction will also have implications for IP selection and chip assembly. This will compel a new genre of tools to emerge. Standards like IP-XACT will help this process to take hold. Perhaps this is what ESL will become.

There will be a renewed focus on the challenges of integrating existing IP, providing breakthrough technology for design teams to quickly and reliably
assemble complex SoCs from integration-ready IP blocks, and then run
full-chip verification including both analog and digital components.

ESL is part of this story because there’s a need to move to
transaction-level IP creation, verification and integration. Hardware/ software integration and verification and will also become part of
the drive towards SoC integration.

As for the EDA trend in 2010, I think that EDA companies, when they recover, will choose not to hire more sales and marketing people but will invest more in other marketing tools on the Web or using social networking strategies.

A good example is a company like Xuropa, which is actually a client of mine, under full disclosure. They help EDA companies put their tools on the Web in order to help them reduce their costs for demos, product evaluations, etc.

I think that will see a lot of interest in the upcoming year as companies look for ways to do “more with less”. User group events may also move online, just like this year’s CDNLive was a virtual event rather than a real live event. Xilinx and Avnet sponsored an X-Fest this year that was also an online event. Things are moving online fast and economics will drive that.

The areas of greatest real ESL use are the high level synthesis of data crunching blocks used in various DSP-type applications (signal and media processing), the increasing adoption of processor/SW-centric design methods, and the increased creation and use of virtual prototype models.

(Brian Bailey and I have a new book from Springer coming out in the new year on practical ESL use methods: “ESL Models and their Application: Electronic System Level Design and Verification in Practice”. See for a summary. )

For EDA, 2010 will be the year of the foundry. Foundries will drive new EDA flows and business models.

The TSMC Open Initiative Platform
is but the tip of the iceberg. If EDA and IP companies do NOT join forces with the foundries and take arms against the sea of semiconductor troubles – they will continue to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous economic misfortune.

In an effort to minimize risk, cost and time to market, design reuse will be
maximized; many of them will be migrations of existing 90nm and 65nm products or derivative products with minor updates and tweaks.